In this 1999 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Jeff Foxworthy sits down fresh off a Grammy nomination and at the peak of “You might be a redneck if…,” and finally tells the story of where the whole thing started. Petty opens by telling him he does not look like a comedian, which is more or less the position he had been working from for a decade.
It did not start in a writing session. It started in a comedy club bolted onto a bowling alley outside Detroit, with some friends ribbing him about his Georgia accent — and then one thing he saw through the window, which turned an insult into an empire. He explains what a redneck actually is, and his definition is not the one the phrase implies. He also describes trusting a hunch that if he laughed at something, everyone else would too, and identifies the bit on his own HBO special that made him break character and lose it completely on camera.
The part worth the whole interview is the leap almost nobody takes. He walks through a steady $60,000 job at IBM, a repossessed car by month three, and a wife who bet on him before he had a dime — “I knew I was going to marry her.” Around it: his father, married six times, and the cookbook; and his theory on why women put seashells on the toilet.
Foxworthy would go on to become one of the best-selling comedy recording artists in history. This is him at forty, before the empire, explaining exactly how he saw it coming. Unseen since its original broadcast, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.
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